GMU FPGA CAD
Tools at School and Home

CAD tools at school

In GMU FPGA-related courses you have an option of
using three different design environments:

Aldec
Active-HDL Environment,

Xilinx ISE Environment, and

Altera Quartus II Environment.

All
three environments can be used to invoke all necessary FPGA
tools: a simulator, synthesis tool, and implementation tool.

The following is a short description of three
aforementioned environments available at school in the
Engineering Building rooms 3204and 3208. Note that the machines in these
rooms may have several different versions of tools installed
on them. Please use versions of tools specified below
unless your instructor recommends otherwise.

For Family, choose the family used in a given
project. For example, selecting "Xilinx 11x Virtex5"
sets the default family as Virtex5. Selecting "Xilinx
11x Spartan3" sets the default family as Spartan3.

When you open a
new project in Altera Quartus II for the first time, initialize the environment to
point to the correct tools.

Go to File..."New Project Wizard"and push
"Next."

For the Working Directory of the Project, choose
Directory Name of your choice.

Choose a "Name of the Project" and enter "Name of the
Top-Level Design Entity" and Push "Next".

In the next Window, specify all existing files (if you
have any), select "Add All" and push "Next".

For Family, choose the family. For example,
"Cyclone II" or "Stratix III" and push "Next".

Under EDA Tools, enter "Modelsim-Altera" for "Simulation"
and select "Next".

Push "Next" and choose the rest of your
options (by default, continue to push "Next" without
making changes) until you push "Finish."

Once you have the
complete VHDL source files for your design, Select
"Compile Design" under "Task" to perform "Analysis &
Synthesis" followed by "Fitter (Place & Route)".

CAD tools at home

Majority of
students like the flexibility of working from home. Aldec and
Xilinx provide free tools to students as described below.
However be forewarned: these tools often carry feature
limitations and may run much slower than full versions of
tools installed at school. Please investigate the vendor
websites to understand the limitations of these tools in
detail.

Since the tools are not exactly the same at school
and at home, you may run into some discrepancies or
incompatibilities. If you are working from home and from
school, be sure to save a copy
of your source files NOT the project folder before trying
to transfer from the home environment to the school
environment or vice-versa, especially if you are Aldec user.
This would eliminate the incompatibility issues that may
arise from different version of tools and computer. Note
that you may need to create a new project for each transfer
of data.

If you work from home, for compatibility reasons, here are the
configurations you are recommended to use. Details on how to
download and install software to attain these configurations
are given below. Again, as with the school computers, you can
choose either the Aldec Environment, Xilinx Environment or
Altera Environment.

All tools run
on Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7 operating
systems.

If you have
problems with the software running on your personal computers,
the best solution is to use the computers in the lab at
school.

Go to
the Aldec Webpageand
click "Download." Then click on "Register". Make
sure to use your GMU Email ID to register.

Once you
Register, you will have to wait for 24 hours before your
account is approved and verified. Follow the
instructions to login.

When you successfully
login, Click "Downloads". Then click "Accept". You will
see a webpage with title "Latest Builds and Libraries".
Click on "Request Eval License" on the right corner. Enter
your MAC address and hit "Submit".

Wait for another email
from Aldec with a download link for Aldec Active-HDL
Student Edition 7.2.

Install the following
libraries for Aldec Student Edition from the same webpage.